The Pipeline Nobody Talks About: How Cartels, Coyotes, and the Construction Industry Are Exploiting People Right Here in Minnesota

By Tyler Bass | Bass for Congress

I’m a general contractor. I’ve spent my career building things — roofs, additions, commercial spaces — right here in the Twin Cities. Over the years, people have come forward and told me things that most people in this industry know but nobody wants to say out loud.

So I’m going to say it.

There is a pipeline running from Central America and Mexico, straight through the southern border, all the way into Minnesota’s roofing crews, restaurant kitchens, and factory floors. It is run by cartels. It is enforced by debt. And it is destroying the job market for honest, hardworking Minnesotans — while simultaneously exploiting the very migrants it pretends to help.

This isn’t a political talking point. This is what I’ve seen. This is what workers have told me. And this is what the data confirms.

The Price of Crossing: $7,000 to $20,000 — and That’s Just the Beginning

Let’s start at the border, because that’s where this story starts.

People don’t simply “sneak across” the southern border anymore. That era is largely over. Today, you cannot cross without paying — and the people collecting that money are cartel-connected human smugglers known as coyotes.

According to a 2022 survey of over 20,000 migrants conducted by a joint initiative of the Mexican government and the International Organization for Migration, the average crossing fee paid to a coyote was nearly $7,000. Women paid even more — averaging $7,839. And those are the averages. A human rights official with the Binational Commission for Human Rights in Tijuana told reporters that fees in some corridors had climbed to between $12,000 and $14,000. Court documents from federal smuggling cases in California recorded migrants paying anywhere from $8,000 to $20,000 in recent years.

Back in the 1990s, crossing cost about $100.

That explosion in price didn’t happen by accident. It happened because cartels took over. As the Law Enforcement Immigration Task Force documented in a 2023 report, human smuggling has transformed over the last decade from a business of individual coyotes guiding people across into a “multi-billion-dollar international business controlled by organized crime.” The report noted that by 2022, it was “impossible to cross” the border at Laredo, Texas without paying a coyote connected to Cartel del Noreste — a splinter of the brutal Los Zetas syndicate. In 2021 alone, transnational criminal organizations earned an estimated $13 billion from human smuggling.

These aren’t entrepreneurs charging a service fee. These are criminal enterprises that treat human beings as product.

When You Can’t Pay, You Work It Off

Here’s where it gets darker.

Many migrants arrive with the full crossing fee. Many don’t. And for those who can’t pay up front, the cartels have a solution: debt bondage.

The FBI describes it plainly on their official website: once smuggled into the U.S., migrants can be charged “exorbitant and never-ending fees for transportation, housing, and other necessities, trapping them in a cycle of debt.” A Domestic Preparedness report on the nexus between drug and human trafficking described how cartels do background checks on migrants before they even leave — mapping out their family members, learning where relatives live, and cataloguing who can be pressured for payment if the migrant tries to walk away.

One security analyst explained the system this way: migrants are told they will be given safe passage. Once in cartel-controlled territory, they are frequently subjected to extortion, kidnapping, and forced labor. The initial payment is often just the beginning of a nightmare, with cartels inflating debts or creating fictitious fees that can never realistically be repaid.

Over 20,000 migrants are kidnapped per year in transit.

These are not people making free choices. They are trapped in a criminal system before they ever set foot in Minnesota.

A Phone Number and a Job: The Twin Cities Pipeline

Here is what I’ve heard directly from workers who’ve come to me — workers who trusted me enough to share what happened to them.

They cross the border. They make it to the interior of the country. And somebody hands them a phone number.

Not a job listing. Not an application. A phone number.

They’re told: when you get to the Twin Cities, call this number. You’ll get a job.

And they do. They call. And they get placed — in a roofing company, a restaurant, a factory. Cash work. No paperwork. No questions. And no way out.

Because here’s the part nobody tells them before they cross: that job placement is part of the system. The labor broker who placed them is connected to the same network that smuggled them across the border. The debt they owe for crossing doesn’t disappear when they start working — it follows them. It gets deducted. It gets added to. The housing they’re put in? That costs money, too, taken from their wages. Transportation to the job site? Added to the debt. The employer knows exactly what’s going on, and the worker knows exactly what happens if they complain.

This is what the Polaris Project — one of the country’s leading anti-trafficking organizations — calls labor trafficking. In a study of over 32,000 human trafficking cases, Polaris found hundreds of instances tied directly to the construction industry, with the majority occurring in exactly the kind of small subcontracting operations that dominate roofing, masonry, and carpentry work.

Minnesota law defines this precisely: debt bondage means someone is under another’s control due to a debt that cannot reasonably be repaid. That is a crime under MN Statute 609.281-609.282. It is happening here.

The Construction Industry Is Deeply Intertwined With This System

I want to be honest about something, because I’ve lived in this industry for years: this is not a secret in construction.

Everyone in the trades knows that roofing, framing, and residential construction run heavily on undocumented labor. According to the Center for American Progress, construction laborers make up the single largest group of undocumented workers in the United States — over 445,800 people. Roofers specifically account for 75,600 undocumented workers, roughly one in ten roofers nationwide. A University of Michigan case study concluded bluntly what experienced contractors already know: subcontractors favor undocumented workers because it saves money and allows them to submit more competitive bids. U.S.-born construction workers earn an average of $3.12 more per hour than their undocumented counterparts.

That gap is why honest contractors who follow the law — who pay prevailing wages, carry proper insurance, run payroll legally — keep losing bids to operations that don’t.

The exploitation doesn’t stop at low wages. Hope Against Trafficking, which works directly with labor trafficking victims, documents what keeps workers trapped in these jobs: wage theft, confiscation of identity documents, threats of deportation, physical isolation from other workers, and outright violence. A worker who is undocumented, in debt to the people who control their housing, and afraid of law enforcement has almost no realistic path to walking off the job — no matter how bad the conditions get.

In Massachusetts, 98 percent of construction hospitalizations and deaths over a recent three-year period came from nonunion contractors. The real number of injuries is almost certainly higher — workers are pressured not to report them. One case that made the news involved a 23-year-old roofer from Ecuador who shattered his collarbone after falling from a 32-foot ladder on Christmas week. He had been working for a subcontractor. He didn’t report it right away. He was afraid.

That story is not rare. Versions of it play out in Minneapolis, in Saint Paul, in every suburb in between.

What Honest Workers and Contractors Are Up Against

I’ve had workers approach me over the years. Some wanted out of the system they were locked into. Some just wanted to understand why they couldn’t get out. A few had left situations that, by any honest definition, were modern slavery — working long hours, living in crowded housing controlled by their employer, paying off a debt that never seemed to shrink.

I’ve had American workers — Minnesotans, born here, raised here — tell me they couldn’t get hired on crews because the labor broker running the site only hired from their network. That network came across the border together. They owe the same people. They work for the same price.

The legitimate contractor who follows the rules is undercut. The American worker who wants the job can’t get it. And the migrant worker trapped in the system can’t leave it.

Everyone loses except the cartels and the unscrupulous operators who benefit from the arrangement.

This Is Not Anti-Immigrant. This Is Anti-Exploitation.

I want to be clear about something, because this issue gets twisted in political debates.

No one in this pipeline is villainizing the workers. The men and women who crossed the border did so because they were desperate. Many were told lies about what was waiting for them. Many had no idea that the “job” they were promised would come with strings attached for years. They are victims of a criminal enterprise — and they deserve to be treated as such, not as criminals themselves.

Minnesota’s own Safe Harbor Law recognizes labor trafficking victims as exactly that: victims. Not criminals. People entitled to protection and services.

But protecting them — and protecting American workers, and protecting honest contractors — requires being honest about what is actually happening. It requires securing the border so that the only path to entering the United States isn’t through a cartel-connected coyote. It requires dismantling the labor broker networks that pipeline people directly from the smuggling system into the construction industry. It requires enforcing the laws already on the books about debt bondage and labor trafficking.

We can want secure borders and compassionate treatment of victims at the same time. Those things are not in conflict. They are both part of the same solution.

What Needs to Happen

Based on what I’ve seen, what workers have told me, and what the data shows, here is what real reform looks like:

Secure the border so that cartels cannot continue charging thousands of dollars for a crossing that becomes the first link in a chain of exploitation.

Prosecute labor trafficking under existing Minnesota statutes. The laws are there. The enforcement needs to match the scale of the problem.

Crack down on labor brokers who operate as pass-throughs for cartel-connected worker placement networks. Anyone misclassifying workers as independent contractors to strip them of legal protections should face serious consequences.

Level the playing field for legitimate contractors. When law-abiding businesses consistently lose bids to operations running on trafficked labor, the entire industry degrades. Fair bidding requires fair enforcement.

Give American workers a real shot. For every undocumented worker placed in a roofing job through a cartel-connected network, there is a Minnesotan who applied and couldn’t get hired. That needs to change.

The cartel pipeline running through Minnesota’s construction industry is not a rumor. It’s not a political talking point. It’s something workers have described to me in person, and it’s something that researchers, law enforcement, and anti-trafficking organizations have documented for years.

The only question is whether we’re willing to say it out loud — and do something about it.

I am.